Sinking Dagon

Marilyn Manson - Thaeter

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Oh, it was island, not city, d'oh!

 

When I dug up the Lovecraftian FPS detective mash-up The Sinking City from my unplayed back-log and realized it wasn't what I'd mentally pictured, I'd apparently confused it with Sinking Island, the 2007 adventure game published by Microids. So now I remedied that misfire. I needn't have bothered.

 

The first Syberia game earned its status as a classic for its melancholic meander through scenic early 20th-century vignettes, but his other work seems to confirm Benoit Sokal's limitation to that one talent. As soon as you load it, Sinking Island manages to make even the pre-menu splash screen more annoying (much like Metro 2033 did) then needlessly complicates the save/load routine with user profiles. But we all suffer through such nonsense if a game's actual content proves good. Here it proves not.

Your name is Jack Norm, and wow, are you ever. Granted, Kate Walker was a bland everywoman protagonist as well, but such a role better fit the requirement of an audience viewpoint in Syberia's exotic clockwork locales. Sinking Island's tropical paradise attempts to recreate that feel, but all the elements are simply telegraphed: quaint natives and their pagan beliefs, the hated old Scrooge, girlfriend with a bad slavic accent, sumptuous yet repetitive resort with many, many pointless rooms and walkways. For something made in 2007 the graphic detail is both expansive and fluid, albeit stiff and stited like anything from that era. But bland aural and visual decor aside, it's the writing that really kills the whole mess.

 

I'm trying to make some allowance for a possibly worse English version (though I cannot seem to change the language in any way) so maybe the French cast took a better stab at pronouncing Battaglieri than bat-a-glee-airy or bat-tag-leery. But them's small potatoes. The script, overall, attempts to flesh out an intreractive whodunit by putting you through all the steps of an investigation, ignoring that all those steps are in fact painfully dull. For one thing, there are too many of them. Literally. Locales are split into several redundant screens each, which you'll need to traverse every time you want to triple-check whether you've pixel-hunted some patch of screen or a character acquired another line of dialogue. For another, the phraseology could stand to be far more terse. For yet another, your very professional investigator repeats the same questions to everyone.

"Good morning Mr./Mrs. Xyz, I am Boring McEveryman; I'm here to be very beige about this police investigation. Do you like billionnaires YES/NO? Now show me some FEET, BABY! Oooohh, yeeaaaaaah!"

Just kidding. I wish it were that entertaining.

Well if this ain't five kinds of awkward.

I especially like her boyfriend just placidly going through his idle animations while some rando interrupts their dinner to photograph his gal's feet. But for the most part the text's just... bad. Wordy and devoid of substance or flavor, choked with clumsy filler like "too bad the weather is so bad" and repetitive exchanges like

"Do these pearls mean anything to you?"

"No, not really, they don't mean anything to me."

Does that prose mean anything to you? Because it does not mean anything to me. 

 

I suppose a less cynical wer than myself might qualify it all as an attempt at naturalistic dialogue instead of obviously entertaining spicy fiction, but even as such it plonks. You'll find none of Syberia 1's charm here. A few quaint ideas like comparing clues in your inventory can't rescue this hopelessly boring paint-by-numbers routine. No point in continuing past the intro. Worth at most the 79 cents I paid for it, and not a centime more.

 

On the other hand, I also picked up a complete freebie called Dagon (which, the title assures us is "by H. P. Lovecraft" - thanks, here I was afraid I'd picked up the Dr. Seuss version by mistake*) which turned out not to be a "game" at all, stretching even the definitions of "walking simulators" and "visual novels" by merely having you click to advance screen by screen. And yet... I cannot believe I'm even saying it, but this one I really would recommend.

It's an illustrated, well-narrated, full read-through of Lovecraft's short work, word-for-word with some interesting historical background and character notes you can right-click here and there. A half-hour's read and listen and watch. A museum curator's notion of a video game... but it works. It is what it is, its few features handled both professionally and with dedication to the source material. Oh, and the irony of Dagon, of all stories, being illustrated by makers of DLCs for Ultimate Fishing Simulator is almost too precious. Had some 3D models left over, did you?

 

How much more funding went into that tedious piece of catalogue filler above? How much better can you handle a worse concept if you don't go into it as a contractual obligation or a lazy, disinterested cash-grab?

 

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* Y'know, I meant that as an honest joke, but a lot of Dr. Seuss really is kinda... non-Euclidean, in a "Mimsy were the Borogoves" flexible young minds style.